OLD MAN GLOOM – MEDITATIONS IN B

One of the more curious but satisfying side projects of the early 2000s, Old Man Gloom set out on their strange but fascinating journey with 2000’s Meditations in B. With its 14 tracks totaling just less than half an hour, the album feels almost more like an EP than proper full-length, yet, musically speaking, it brought enough creative heft not only to establish the group’s inscrutable science- and primate-based lyrical preoccupations, but to determine the blueprint for hard/soft sonic extremes to be further played out on subsequent efforts. As such, violent metalcore bursts like “Afraid Of” and “Vipers” come interspersed with equal measures of ambient effects and sound collages (“Simian Alien Technology,” “Sonar Enlightenment,” etc.), some of them almost too silent to be heard sometimes.